The Big Finish: My Professional Placement Part 4

Hello once again!

This has been quite the journey we’ve traveled, hasn’t it. Starting off with some tests, moving onto fabrication of little people and animals, switching over to production, and now that we’re through all of the specific puppet-like things needed to make a puppet film, it just comes down to the regular post-production processes. You have to edit the footage, put sound to the images and piece everything together into the complete product, like any other film.

Taking a look back, one thing that helped tremendously with shooting of my puppet film was an animatic. This is when you put the storyboard frames into an editing timeline and estimate the length of each shot in the film. This allows you to have a rough estimate of the length of your film, along with what the length of each shot should be.

When you look past my crude, child-like drawings, there is something there that resembles the film. The voice over is just a scratch track used for timing purposes, but the music is the real deal and I won’t have to deal in lengthy legal battles after using it in my film, either. It’s Creative Commons music that can be found on a number of websites and can be used for most purposes without cost, for almost everything.

There is a taste of the music I’ve found that fits almost too perfectly with my film. The sites I found those bits of music on are freemusicarchive.org and archive.org. They are great resources with tons of different styles of music that range through time, all the way back to when music was first being recorded. You can find rare gems that would never exist otherwise and it is quite amazing to even just browse through the massive catalogues. There is also this list of Creative Commons music websites that have even more music of many different types to peruse.

Once all of the pieces for the film come together, there’s nothing left to do but polish it up and get it seen by the people! Lucky for everyone, makers and viewers, these puppet films being made at the Puppetworks are going to be in a film festival happening April of 2013 to showcase Saskatchewan and international puppet films alike. It will be an incredibly exciting event and its uniqueness cannot be overstated, that’s for certain. All of the tremendous and sometimes outrageous puppet films discussed in this blog series and on puppetfilm.blogspot.com are something to look forward to.

With that comes the end of my time at the Filmpool Puppetworks. There are a number of finishing touches to be put on to my film, but that’ll have to be done from home, unfortunately. It had been so amazing to spend half my summer at the Filmpool with Chrystene, Berny, and all of the puppetientists that were a part of the workshop. It led me to create one of my most ludicrous films yet and definitely got me very interested in the possibilities that puppet films have. It was such a wonderful experience and I cannot wait to see everyone’s films.

Keep your eyes out for more news on the puppet film festival in the future!

And as a special treat to everyone, here is the trailer of the puppet film I’ve been working on the entire summer!

Thanks for reading!

Eric Kanius

#IPUFF #music #ChrysteneElls #BernyHi #CreativeCommons